It is impossible to convey by description the charm and gentle humor of this book.
But acclaimed on all sides, by all classes of society, as the most talented writer of the present day, is the young man who writes under the name of Maxim Gorky (Bitter).

The majority of the critics confidently predict that he is the long-expected successor of Count L.N.Tolstoy.

This gifted man, who at one stroke, conquered for himself all Russia which reads, whose books sell with unprecedented rapidity, whose name passes from mouth to mouth of millions, wherever intellectual life glows, and has won an unnumbered host of enthusiastic admirers all over the world, came up from the depths of the populace.
"Gorky" Alexei Maximovitch Pyeshkoff was born in Nizhni Novgorod in 1868 or 1869.

Socially, he belongs to the petty burgher class, but his grandfather, on the paternal side, was reduced from an officer to the ranks, by the Emperor Nicholas I., for harsh treatment of the soldiers under his command.

He was such a rough character that his son (the author's father) ran away from home five times in the course of seven years, and definitively parted from his uncongenial family at the age of seventeen, when he went afoot from Tobolsk to Nizhni Novgorod, where he apprenticed himself to a paper-hanger.